My route on Day 4 looks a bit curious on first inspection. To begin with it heads pretty much south-west, and then at a town called Domfront it turns due west: two sides of a triangle... I don’t question it at the time, but the reason becomes clear at Domfront. I find myself joining a cycle route, or as they are called in French, a voie verte, or ‘green way’.
For obvious reasons, we… Well, largely our gps cycling apps… have a love affair with cycle routes. Ineluctably we are drawn to them. In most ways cycle routes are a good thing: they are safer because they protect us from the traffic, and usually they are more pleasant because they take us through deep countryside. Usually they are literally a green way.
The route west from Domfront, like many of the cycle routes in the UK, has taken up a disused railway track - and what was a quiet, underused branch line even in the Nineteenth Century by the look of it. This one heads into really remote country, linking hamlets and farms rather than towns or even villages. And like all railway lines it is flat - trains just don’t like a hill – so that’s a small boon. There’s no climbing at all.
The going is slightly slower than on roads for other reasons. Gravel, dog-walkers and ‘furniture’ - mainly metal barriers that force a bob and a weave as you cross a road - mean that you’re quite often slowing down, but pleasant they are, surrounded by fields, woods and meandering rivers, with shade from trees that now line the old track.
And so, in the light-industrial outskirt of Domfront, I join the Voie Verte du Bocage. At the junction there are even a couple of helpful signs to fill me in on the local cultural and natural life: Patrimoine – megaliths, a medieval city at Domfront itself, manor houses and an 11th Century abbey whose influence stretched as far as England all those centuries back. And then the Produits of the Terroir – apples and pears, mainly, and Calvados and Poiré.
Cider and Calvados (its fortified equivalent) are pretty well known in Britain, but the word poiré has just a tiny echo in English nowadays - in our ‘Perry’, if you’ve heard of it – the drink made from fermented pears. It isn’t drunk much any more and then probably not outside Hereford and Worcestershire. But it gets serious treatment hereabouts. About a dozen of the 30 varieties of pear grown in the region are used in it apparently: picked very ripe, crushed, fermented and distilled in a column still, which produces 70% alcohol. Local Calvados even has an Appelation d’Origine Controlee: it should contain 30% pear juice in the mashing process before distillation. After which it should be aged in oak barrels for three years to give it its amber colour. Good to know.
Right, on we go. And, lid off. My helmet can swing from the handlebars for a change and the air can go through my hair. The hum of my tyres on tarmac changes to a gentle crinkle and scrunch on the fine gravel and raw pebbles. I hear birdsong. Around me is elderflower, even unexpectedly some bracken. And in the bottom of the valley, insects hover, jiggling with brownian motion, in any patch of shade.
My lunch stop is on a bridge across a river. I have been waiting for a bench, but there has been none for a while, so I lean against the old stone parapet. God this is bucolic and beautiful. The river beneath me is mid-whiplash, but the water itself is moving leisurely, lazily along. In the distance a farmer is working: the low grumble of his machinery snarls and grinds as he reverses and turns.
I mentioned in passing that this is the Voie Verte du Bocage. Eventually it will go out onto the coastal flatlands, right to Mt St Michel (a great favourite of the young TE Lawrence), profuse green land is all around me: the pastures and the copses and coverts, hedgelines and thickets, rolling hills and streams. I have a limited tactical sense, but I can see that this would be awful country to advance through, expecting from every bush and corner an incoming volley of fire.
It is hot work, despite the shade. I come to a farm. I ask for some water.
“Of course.” The farmer nods, and points at a tap.
I make a silly gesture about it being hot work. He looks at me knowingly. A master of laconic communication, this one:
“Humide, Msieu.”
I cycle on, passing a former railway station, marooned now in time and function, what are left of its platforms now given to grass. And gradually a notion creeps up on me. It’s too quiet. I am not absorbing enough from endless hedges and embankments. I am missing the road: the houses, the shapes of the orchards and life in the gardens. Road-signs? Well, yes, them too, with their teasingly evocative names. What on earth goes on in a place called St Hilaire du Harcouet? Not much, as it turns out, of course, but there’s only so much countryside inactivity one can take.
So at five pm, as the sunlight starts to turn golden, I find myself sitting in the main square of St Hilaire du Harcouet, under the awning of a café, with a coffee and a flagon of water, map on the table in front of me, and I scope out a route across country, loosely following a river valley. The river is the Selune, on whose banks I will be staying tonight in Ducey, so surely it will be a pretty ride.
How wrong you can be. The river seems impossible to pin down. Each time I take a turn in the hope of following it I end tracking back, confused or confounded… into a municipal dump, the storage depot for local council machinery (is that a stack of snow-plough blades?) and an impassable bridge being mended… Am I being sucked ineluctably back to the cycle path?
In fact I end up on the main road. Oh, well. It’s quicker. And, unexpectedly, enticing - as I summit a gradual rise above Ducey, the view carries all the way to Mont St Michel, 15 miles away. The Mont was a favourite of the young TE Lawrence and it really is spectacular, looming in the distance, back-lit by the afternoon sun. But that’s for tomorrow.